


Of Corks and Leashes and Uncut Hair

by Newhieghts



Series: Character Introspection [7]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Character Study, Could feasibly be interpreted as Eponine is a bit gay for Cosette, Eponine is THINKING, Gen, anyway. off topic, but so am i (for both of them), i just got some thoughts ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:08:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24394054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Newhieghts/pseuds/Newhieghts
Summary: There is a cork stuck in her throat and a leash around her neck and hair riddled with split ends.There is Marius and there is Cosette and there is a cause that overlooks her.There is Eponine Thenardier on the steps of a cafe, putting it all in order.
Series: Character Introspection [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1260443
Kudos: 2





	Of Corks and Leashes and Uncut Hair

There is a cork stuck in her throat. 

Like the one in old beer bottles, those glassy green things that sailors would waste the day on. With their cheery laughter and teasing jeers, they pay no heed to the cork pressed down into the neck of their drink. 

She is the bottle, she supposes. Filled to the brim with a poison no one can seem to get enough of, tasting something sour and numbing. Green with envy, green with sick, green with disgust; all engraved on a glassy face. Most importantly, there is a cork in her throat. It keeps the poison contained. It keeps the poison at bay. It keeps it all for herself. No sailors come calling for her poison. She doesn't want them to. She doesn't care for their plastered on smiles or their delirious, raucous laughter. She cannot share in their delight when she is so full with this poison... this illness. 

It must be an illness. It cannot be anything but. 

How can anything make her feel like this? Like there is something stuck in her throat -- that awful, dreadful cork -- something that ends in the pit of her stomach and churns her insides to sickness. Acid is like a turbulent sea in her stomach, nauseating and painful. She will choke on the cork first if she does not drown in its acidic contents. Her acidic contents. There is a plague inside her, singular to her. There is no pandemic, no outbreak of rats, and no unsightly boils. This is her private plague, one that she is mothering inside her. 

She wants nothing more than to pour out her poison, pour out her plague, but that damn cork. That damn cork plugs her throat and traps her insides from escaping when the swell and implode and she must sob her poison out in acid tears. They burn her skin and screw up her features. Features that she knows, God knows, are not the prettiest, but the sight of her reddened cheeks and her puffy eyes in a mirror churn her stomach even more. Which in turn makes her sicker, which in turn bubbles more tears from her eyes. It is a cycle she cannot find the strength to break. It is a cycle she wants nothing more than to break but... it isn't that easy, she’s found.

She’s had plenty of reasons to cry. If she had not learnt to toughen her skin and harden her eyes in the face of words that cut like knives, she is certain she would have cried every day since her thirteenth birthday. She did, however, learn to toughen herself and take the insults and sneers hurled at her about her parents, her criminal doings. 

She has learnt not to be Eponine Thenardier around people. She’s just Eponine when she lingers on the steps outside the cafe, just Eponine, Marius’ friend and servant and saviour. Just another busybody for these rich men’s sons. It plugs the cork in ever tighter, so she doesn’t dwell on that fact, or the fact she can’t stand it. 

But she keeps running after Marius like a lost dog, sloshing the poison around inside of her. 

Poison bottle, poison girl. It sort of makes sense that Grantaire likes her. At least, he always nods hello when he comes up the stairs with a bottle already in hand. She always tucks herself closer to the wall and returns the greeting in turn. They only ever pass ways because Grantaire is always late and Eponine is a dog pawing at the door. 

One of these days she’s going to untie the leash she put on herself, and one day she will uncork her throat, and one day she will cut her hair and become unrecognisable and there will be no role to play, no Eponine personalities to jump between, because she will be Eponine, her own one. Not her father’s Eponine and not Marius’ Eponine and not the street’s Eponine. She will be Just. 

One day. 

But she’s still sitting on the steps, listening through the walls to a meeting she doesn’t understand because they talk of things so much bigger than boys. They talk of revolution and of regicide and smoking guns and burning coffins. They talk about things that are impossible. 

They don’t talk about her. They don’t talk about the prostitutes at the dock. They don’t talk about her parents’ swindling. They talk about something they can’t ever stop. 

She ought to uncork herself and pour herself out on their mopped floors and shiny tables and turn their laughing faces to disgust when she sicks up every second of her life as a street rat. She wants to splash them with poison, corrode their lovely tables and turn their water to wine and their wine to pure acid. She wants them to know that the world does not start with monarchs and laws, and will not end in bloodshed and victory. It starts with the rats on the street outside, it starts with the beggars and the thieves and it starts with helping the hungry, and getting shot does not feed a starving family. It starts with her. 

But the cork is jammed and her leash is tight and her hair is long. 

So she’ll sit tight and follow Marius and beg for meagre scraps of his attention, just to feel like she’s more than she is, just to loosen the cork. 

She presses a thumb to the base of her throat, feels her pulse there; steady and quiet. She can breathe just fine, and she is used to such pressure that it is a familiar thing. Her mother, when her mother was nice, told her it was an excellent way to shoo away hiccups. Her mother was only nice because she had another little girl to berate. 

She wonders if Cosette is happy with the tall gentleman who took her away -- bought her, as far as she could garner from her parents waving a handful of cash and seething at each other’s throats. That was never new though. What was new was being back to the punching bag she had almost forgotten being. 

She wonders if she has something caught in her throat too, if all this is a side effect of the Thenardier household. She wonders if Cosette knows how to get it out. But Cosette is not a beggar girl. She knew even in her young age that blue eyes and blond hair could be combed into finery. Cosette was never a Thenardier and never crooked. Cosette was beautiful and terrified and Eponine resented her and adored her in equal measures. 

She wonders how long Cosette’s hair is now, if it grew at the same rate at hers. Maybe she cut it, but she doubts that to be the case. The gentleman who took her in obviously had no need to take her by the scruff and hack at her hair for a handful of sous. Eponine touches her own choppy split ends now. Some difference it made. 

They never cut it too short though. Never cut it so short that it could not be yanked at or tugged when she misbehaved or wasn’t concentrating. Leashes and corks she thinks, leashes and corks. Something to drag her by and something to stifle her. 

What curious creatures they were. 

Marius and Grantaire and Cosette and Enjolras. Granted, she had never spoken to the golden leader, but she knew. Of course she knew. You did not skulk on the steps of meetings like these and be unaware of Enjolras. Grantaire had slurred on the steps and called him Apollo. How fitting. How mighty he was too, to skip the needs of the needy and up heave the government. 

She didn’t think it was a bad thing they were doing. On the contrary, she wanted to believe in their extremes. But she was on the opposite of the sliding scale of extremes. An enemy of her enemy was an ally, she supposes, glumly. 

She still wants to wash their floors with poison though. She wants to uncork herself and untie herself and cut her hair short. 

But the door opens and the boys pour out, and Marius is standing at the top step. 

So she doesn't do any of those things.


End file.
